On June 21, after 125 years of standing at attention, the bronze soldier on top of the North Carolina State Confederate Monument was finally laid to rest on the bed of a flatbed truck. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) had ordered the monument removed from the Capitol grounds after the death of George Floyd.
As the soldier came down in Raleigh, spectators cheered, took photos and sang “We Shall Overcome.” But I wondered where that truck was headed. After all, under North Carolina’s 2015 Historic Artifact Management and Patriotism Act, any removed monuments must be placed somewhere as prominent as their original location. Thus, the soldier so gently removed from his perch in 2020 will likely be boosted back up on it again one day soon.
That soldier has plenty of company. Not a single one of America’s hundreds of public Confederate monuments has ever come permanently, irreversibly down.
In 2015, the white supremacist massacre in Charleston, S.C., spurred government authorities to take down 11 Confederate monuments in cities across the South. But six quickly went back on view in public locations, including cemeteries, battlefield sites and a museum. One, from Rockville, Md., was still visible to the public until June, when it went back in storage. Its new owner, a private ferry company, displayed the statue on the banks of the Potomac River next to its embarkation point. The rest remain in storage, but almost all the cities have indicated they are merely deciding on the proper alternate location for their monuments.
The same pattern is true of the nearly 30 Confederate monuments dismantled in reaction to the events in Charlottesville in 2017, and the nearly 100 Confederate monuments either toppled by protesters or removed by authorities after Floyd’s death. Some were damaged, but none beyond repair. A statue of Christopher Columbus in Waterbury, Conn., decapitated in July 2020, had its head reattached and was back on its pedestal in front of City Hall by the end of the year.
Rather than destroying monuments, the 2020 protests may have protected them, rendering it impossible for communities to make democratic decisions about their public spaces. My research shows that after the protests began last summer, legislators in 18 states proposed bills increasing the criminal penalties for vandalizing a monument. Meanwhile, 13 state legislatures considered bills that would make even the official removal of monuments more difficult or outright impossible.